In September 11, 1974 as the General Yakubu Gowon’s administration began a swift and irreversible descent into infamy, the time bomb of tragedy also began ticking away. It was on this day that Daily Times of Nigeria, under the leadership of the patrician, courteous but highly patriotic Alhaji Babatunde Jose, published a landmark editorial titled: Darkness Visible.
Magisterial and majestic and in the best tradition of the old Thunderer, its London ancestor and forebear, the editorial was unanswerable in most parts. It was a searing and penetrating rebuke of Gowon’s administration and its very notorious foibles. Bristling with candour and intransigent integrity, the editorial did not mince words in bemoaning the terrible plight of the country and the dark alley of despotism and intolerance it was headed under Gowon’s leadership. It concluded that darkness was quite visible.
Besmirched with corruption and sleaze and with several federal commissioners embroiled in scandals and allegations of graft, it was obvious that the administration had reached the end of its tether. Worse still, it has resorted to equivocations and lazy tergiversations about the destiny of the nation.
As if Daily Times was having a clairvoyant premonition, General Gowon, in his Independence Day broadcast to the nation on October 1, 1974, promptly foreclosed the option of a honourable exit by reneging on his promise to hand over to a civilian administration by 1976. For those adept at reading the rustling tea leaves, it was the beginning of the end.
Even then, it was a calculated risk by Daily Times. The paper had been having a running battle with the military authorities over the state of the nation. Alhaji Jose and his crew could not have been expecting a warm and royal welcome to Dodan Barracks from the normally affable and sunny-tempered General Gowon.
The drama is memorably captured for posterity in Jose’s memoir titled, Walking A Tightrope: Power Play in Daily Times. Although like all insiders of power and substance, Jose cloaks his resistance in reticence and considerable punch-pulling, suffice it to add that barely a year after, Gowon was ousted in a palace coup by disaffected colleagues.
That editorial was forty eight years ago. Today, darkness is no longer visible. Darkness has become part of our integral national condition and the current darkness is pervasive and all-encompassing in the postcolonial hell that Nigeria has since transited to. This is because all rational human societies have their safety valves, their acute and accurate barometers for measuring and gauging the mood of the nation and for sensing the approach of a historic blackout.
Even traditional societies with their different cosmologies and modes of apprehending and making sense of their lived experience were not exempt from such social, economic and political instrumentalities. They simply took a different approach because of their different cultures and differing historical trajectories. And it worked for them until the colonial irruption which torpedoed their confidence and ability to believe in themselves.
Forty eight years after the Daily Times editorial and forty seven years after the advent of Gowon, darkness has become invisible with the entire country crouching in historic darkness and with everybody trying to feel their way out of the millennial void. In the plague-like still and the deathlike clam, it is impossible to see beyond one’s nose. All cats appear black in the dark metaphysical hour of retribution.
As it is said by Eugene Ionesco, the founding father of the Theatre of the Absurd, everybody must get on with it. It is your responsibility to lift yourself out of the serpentine pit of sightlessness by your own bootstraps. But this is impossible in the uterine darkness. Yet there appears to be no one in sight to beam a visionary searchlight to illuminate the passage of a confused and disoriented populace.
Forty eight years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine the entire nation thrown into three days of continuous darkness as a result of the collapse of the national grid. Yet in the last one and a half decades, this has happened with such amazing regularity that it has become regularized as an integral part of the national condition. It is certainly rich for the Minister of Mines and Power to inform the nation that the collapsed national grid has been recovered. Where was he for three days?
In civilized and rational countries, a national power outage of more than three minutes often provokes a state of emergency with widespread looting and rioting. In Nigeria it is so normal that it is protests against it that have become very abnormal. Yet it is impossible for acute observers not to feel that something is welling up which may eventuate in a nasty and totally unanticipated finale.
All ruling classes that have not reached historic superannuation would have developed inherent capacity for maintaining and sustaining the order of illusion on which the illusion of order which guarantees their rule is based. Hence, the need for social, economic, political and spiritual whistle blowers who raise the cautionary alarms when things are going awry beyond obtuse violence and clueless minatory intimidation.
The current Nigerian ruling class has not shown the capacity to maintain and sustain the order on which their suzerainty and hegemonic rule is anchored. Hence, the seething tensions and discontent gripping the entire country beyond the placid surface. But who will bell the cat in the torrid darkness and pervasive hopelessness?
Forty eight years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the national body of the university teachers to proceed on a month-long industrial action without provoking a national outrage. Students and their parents alike would have been out on the streets. Now, the compulsory holiday amidst compulsory darkness has been extended for another two months. Yet nobody appears willing to take the bull by the horn. Ignorance of darkness is a perfect complement for darkness imposed by ignorance.
While at home, the students will be doing their best without food on the table, without potable water and in an atmosphere of unremitting darkness compounded by escalating insecurity. The students will do well to evade the relentless traps laid by the barons of the novel industry of ritual killing for monetary purposes. Not even public transportation is safe anymore. Ritual killers and harvesters of human parts are on the prowl everywhere. They even murder their own parents.
While one was growing up, ritual sacrifice for economic enhancement was part of a traditional folklore of fear and trembling with known practitioners given a wide berth no matter their wealth and unexplainable prosperity. The rumour alone was enough to invite popular aspersions and obloquy.
That this scary development would have been unthinkable forty eight years ago is a grim reminder and a perplexing indication of the complete collapse of civilization as we know it. A new Dark Age, fashioned and franchised by arrogant people jinxed by an antediluvian worldview, has been slammed on the nation. The normal evolutionary process is for a grub to become a butterfly. But here, we are dealing with a butterfly that has turned into a grub. In the course of a traumatic transition to modernity, Nigeria has reverted to the status of a Stone Age society.
This is what happens to a society where all the great whistle blowers have shouted themselves hoarse and have lapsed into slumberous repose or transited to greater glory beaten down by struggle-fatigue and sheer enervation of the spirit.
Our great poets warned us ages ago about the dangers of toying with political earthquake; our great journalists like Jose cautioned us; Ayodele Awojobi screamed from the rooftop until he fatally collapsed and Gani Fawehinmi too before he succumbed to the cancer of perfidy and circuitous elimination.
Simeon Adebo and Adeoye Lambo went to their maker bemoaning the fate of the nation. In the case of Lambo, he had advocated a psychiatric evaluation for our prospective leaders as a befitting Parthian to a nation set on the path of self-destruction. As far back as 1982, Awolowo warned about the inevitable collapse of the economy.
The naira then was still a strong and competitive currency; its value backed by a strong productive base. Now, it is one of the weakest currencies on the continent. Yet many of those who put us in this mess are still beating their chest about in confounding self-justification and with a sense of entitlement to boot. Talk of a postcolonial culture without any sense of shame.
But as it has been famously observed, a person can make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is another matter entirely. A sovereign who invites the smallpox epidemic to his coronation just to instil fear in his subjects has brought a plague on his family and the entire community. Hell, like a plague, is an equal opportunity terminator which does not distinguish between sovereign and subject. The only hierarchy it recognizes is the hierarchy of the dead and the dying and the only stratification possible is one between the quick and the wounded.
The ancient drum is only for the wise and the well-schooled to decode and decipher. Only the discerning can establish a nexus between the exit of our whistleblowing titans and the way and manner the EndSars upheaval crashed upon us seemingly without any warning or signal, just like the coronavirus pandemic and the on-going violent restructuring of the global order.
All happy nations are the same, with the same level of expectations. It is only unhappy nations that are unhappy nations that are unhappy in their own way. Nigeria is a uniquely unhappy nation. Any nation so shrouded in darkness to the point that it has lost the dynamic capacity and the internal mechanism to recognise imminent danger to itself is not fit for purpose and is a drag on the emerging World Order.
Consequently and in the light of what has been enumerated above, it should be obvious to all who can still see beyond their nose that we have gone beyond the point of mere palliatives and panel beating. This is a vehicle showing all the signs of metal fatigue.
In the circumstances, nothing short of a strategic re-envisioning of the nation; a visionary re-imagining of an organic community of equal stakeholders which moves the country away from the ruins of a blighted and devastated landscape will do. Anything short of that is empty grandstanding and mere political tomfoolery. May our ancient whistle blowers find blissful rest.